Country Living Series

Saturday, January 30, 2016

The true definition of 'rights'

In response to the column, I got the loveliest email from a reader named Ray, who gave permission to reprint it here:

I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoy reading your weekly article.

I get up on Saturday morning and it is the first page that I read. Upon completion, I smile and then I ponder on how I can use it this week. This weeks article gave a different insight that I can share. I usually call it stealing, but now have a different frame of reference.

Thanks and if you start a daily article, you know I will be reading it.

once again you have nailed it! Both my wife's parents and mine made huge sacrifices so that we could both go to school and get an education. We then took those advantages and made something of our lives. The fact that you may not be able to afford a cell phone does NOT in any way mean that I should be forced to pay for one for you. The same goes for food, a roof over your head, medical care or anything else that is titled something you are entitled to. Our founders said pursuit of happiness for a reason, you are not entitled to happiness just the right to pursue it.

Think you are on the right track. Their rights or our RIGHTS. Choose whom you will serve. Thing about it is though as great as R.E. Lee was he was on the losing side. Let's hope if we choose to rebel this time we won't lose.

Yes Anonymous, we need to choose whom we will serve. I too hope we would win. But throughout history most revolutions failed. Robert E. Lee was on the losing side, and most likely we would too. But more important, Lee was on the right side.

Like most Americans, I was taught something much different about The War of Federal Aggression. Remember that winners of war get to write the history books and school books. The ‘winner’ wrote the text books. Then it methodically removed God and the Bible from their schools. What does that tell you?

John Quincy Adams said it best, “Duty is ours; results are God's.”Montana Guy

First off your article says it all and correctly. Second I read the entire comments as of last night. The comments around the "right" to food made me ill. They just don't get it. If you want to help someone as an individual then do so, When the Guvmint demands that you do by stealing money from you, you become slave.

Keep up the good fight for real freedom.

Oh and the second comment deriding your ability to understand the Constitution made me very angry.

If the government isn't going to treat food, housing, and medical care as rights...

...then I want the laws to stop dictating HOW we can get our food (dumpster diving shouldn't be a crime; neither should foraging on public land), WHAT constitutes adequate housing to be permitted to keep your children under whatever roof you can cobble together, and WHO can administer medical care (you shouldn't be flagged for taking your kids to a charity clinic when antibiotics are absolutely required, or charged with neglect for using home medicine when they're not; there shouldn't be a poop-storm over "root doctors" 'practicing medicine without a license.')

Conversely, if John Q. Public wants to demand that the government dictate those things (or we collectively choose to allow a handful of nib-nosed self-righteous do-gooders to do so), then we can all foot the bill to help the two struggling quintiles of the population meet the standards we've allowed to be set.

Mc, most, if not all, of what the federal gov does is not legal according the US constitution. It does not give them the power to tell you what you can eat, or how you get it, except that you can't take it from somebody else. It does not give them the power to regulate what kind of housing you have, nor how it's built(such as electrical codes). It does not give them the power to say only a doctor can give you permission to take antibiotics. Nor does it give room for the EPA, FDA, CIA, NSA, nor any of a host of alphabet soup agencies. And these presidential orders, technically those aren't laws. They are marching orders for those employed under him, and him only.

So how does that gov get away with it? The people don't know any better, are too complacent/comfortable/addicted to it to stop it, or just plain demand it.

You're right, it's NOT in the Constitution. It's NOWHERE in the Constitution...

...but it's not forbidden either, and it is the law. I can trot out story after story after story.

Including the story of the time a nurse tried to take my kids from me because I showed up in the ER sick, driving an 8-year-old Cavalier, wearing sweatpants (because the baby had a blowout on my last clean pair of jeans, and if you're sick enough for the ER, you're probably having a hard time keeping up with laundry). I must have been on meth, in her opinion; in her opinion, the law justified the immediate removal of my children from my care.

I had a friend growing up (back in the Reagan/Bush Sr. years) whose family was very poor. The father was self-employed as an appliance repairman; their understanding of Christianity dictated that the mother must stay at home with the children. They did not apply for, or accept, welfare or any other form of charity outside their church. They might have had more money, but they also believed in practicing charity-- so when a customer couldn't pay the bill, he took barter instead. There was always food (when things hadn't gone well, I rather suspect some of it came from the Dumpster behind the A&P)...

...and they lived under the constant shadow of threat of losing their kids. They had a coal furnace (though oftentimes it burned garbage instead) and the house was warm-- but Social Services wanted central forced air. They had clean water and a toilet that worked-- but Social Services had a problem with the fact that sometimes you had to carry the graywater out in a bucket. They had electricity on the lower story of the house-- Social Services had a problem with the fact that, in the bedrooms, you had to either use a lantern or run an extension cord.

I remember one particularly notable episode that was triggered by the mother's decision to take her oldest daughter to the clinic to get a penicillin shot for a sore throat and high fever that she couldn't cure herself, being reasonably confident (and correct) that it was Streptococcus... YEAH.

If we're going to criminalize poverty (or if we're going to allow a certain segment of the population to criminalize poverty), then by default, we are responsible for forking out the money for the government to make sure everyone has a way to not be criminally poor.

If you want my opinion, the same vitriol goes for those who like to STIGMATIZE poverty too. To this day, I disagree with some of my friend's parents' childrearing practices, but in almost 40 years of living, finer people I have never met.

The alternative, of course, would be for We The People to tear down the ridiculous regulations that we've allowed to be put into place, and make clear to all the sparkling do-gooders what the law does and does not demand (and then, if they want to do REAL good instead of looking off the ends of their noses and attempting to control people, more power to them).

I would be interested to know why the rights of parents to vaccinate or not their children is being eroded away from them? California is now requiring it. What we put into our bodies and that of our children should not be the governments choice but ours. To put it mildly, we have been duped by the government and most in the medical field into buying into all of these vaccines in our very young. And at what cost? Vaccinated injuries and even deaths are conveniently covered up and our government has made immune the pharmaceutical companies from any damages.

I am NOT against every vaccine and know the history of many diseases that are no longer with us TB, Polio, Small Pox, etc. but Hep C for infants? Chicken Pox for all? I think our species will suffer the consequences of the genetic manipulation with trying to wipe out every inconvenient disease.

The premise behind the Chicken Pox vaccine is that it also (allegedly anyway) prevents Shingles, which is caused with the Varicella-Zoster Virus, introduced when you got the Chicken Pox and still latent in your body, becomes re-activated later on down the road. Other than the 4 out of 100 kids who might have a more serious reaction to the virus, that's the only reason to vaccinate against Chicken Pox...

...but I've seen my husband get a very mild case of Shingles as a result of immunosuppression resulting from long-term sleep deprivation and work stress, and that was reason enough to put an end to any doubts I had about getting the kids vaccinated for Chicken Pox.

Chicken Pox?? Meh. Shingles?? Holy mackerel!! He was miserable for a month.

As far as Hep C goes, right now there is no vaccine (though I'm sure that, if there's money to be made from it, they're working on that).

There is a vaccine for Hep A. There should be-- Hep A can be spread by fecal-oral transmission (that means eating food that's been touched by someone who has it and didn't wash after wiping, or drinking water that has been contaminated) and possibly also by direct contact with an infected person. The only things more contagious are either mosquito-vectored or airborne.

There is a vaccine for Hep B. Not so sure about that one, as Hep B is transmitted by blood and bodily fluids. That brings up thoughts of AIDS, which of course we all know how you get (at least in the developed world where we presumably screen blood nowadays). But I'd definitely want it if I were going to be working in the medical field, or with populations that are likely to do something volatile like spit in my face if they don't like what I tell them...

...or if I were living with someone who was infected (there's the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about "bodily fluids," but allegedly Hep B is a little hardier than HIV and can survive for a while on your toothbrush).

If there were a Hep C shot, I'd probably get it too. If she hadn't gotten Hep C and developed liver cancer as a result, my mother might have beaten the kidney cancer and gotten to stick around to see her daughter grow up and meet her grandkids. According to my father and to the CDC data, she most likely got it as a result of a needle stick at work (she was a nurse). My personal opinion is that she was more likely to have picked it up by sleeping with every man that sniffed around her skirt from the time she left my dad until she got too sick to go rutting around like a bitch in heat, and therefore pretty much brought it on herself...

...but the CDC says that's very uncommon, and I suppose that, having never stood in her shoes, maybe it's not my place to stand as her judge and jury. They tell me God's the only one supposed to do that.